Some of the books I hope to buy and read soon!

Italo Calvino

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

California

Visionary and Everyday

With this posthumously published anthology--a successor to his bestselling Italian Folktales--Italo Calvino, a contemporary surveyor of the otherwordly, pays homage to twenty-six of his nineteenth-century precursors. The resulting volume is both an education in the history of fantastic literature and a rollercoaster ride of wonder and terror, vampires, ghosts, and the rebellious creatures of our own psyches. Selections include: E.T.A. Hoffmann--"The Sandman" Gérard de Nerval--"the Enchanted Hand" Nikolai Gogol--"The Nose" Edgar Allan Poe--"The Tell-Tale Heart" Hans Christian Andersen--"The Shadow" Ambrose Bierce--"Chickamauga" Robert Louis Stevenson--"The Bottle Imp" Henry James--"The Friends of the Friends" H.G. Wells--"The Country of the Blind" Comprising stories of the supernatural and narratives of the everyday uncanny, Fantastic Tales is a gallery of enchantments, deliciously entertaining yet more disturbing than our most persistent nightmares.

Fantastic Tales

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Gloria Naylor

Tayari Jones

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Florida

A Novel in Seven Stories

The National Book Award-winning novel--and contemporary classic--that launched the brilliant career of Gloria Naylor, now with a foreword by Tayari Jones

"[A] shrewd and lyrical portrayal of many of the realities of black life . . . Naylor bravely risks sentimentality and melodrama to write her compassion and outrage large, and she pulls it off triumphantly." --The New York Times Book Review

"Brims with inventiveness--and relevance." --NPR's Fresh Air

In her heralded first novel, Gloria Naylor weaves together the stories of seven women living in Brewster Place, a bleak-inner city sanctuary, creating a powerful, moving portrait of the strengths, struggles, and hopes of black women in America. Vulnerable and resilient, openhanded and openhearted, these women forge their lives in a place that in turn threatens and protects--a common prison and a shared home. Naylor renders both loving and painful human experiences with simple eloquence and uncommon intuition in this touching and unforgettable read.

The Women of Brewster Place

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Mavis Gallant

Peter Orner

No notes or highlighting. From a smoke- and pet-free home. See photos for cover/spine condition.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant’s novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant’s unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (née Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow—recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe—is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley’s life begin to recede—Philippe having apparently though not definitively left—her freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story? Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant’s first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants—in Venice, Cannes, and Paris—glamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.

A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky

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WISHFUL WANTING

Dee A. McD

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